I recently got our energy bill for the period covering the recent cold snap: $500! Granted that was some record-setting weather but still… $500! Ouch. I’m still in shock. Or perhaps I should say I’m floored.

Some of my friends assumed this high bill was indicative of high energy costs here in Southeast Louisiana. I don’t know how we compare to other parts of the country, but I don’t think that’s the culprit.

Rather, it’s the amount of electricity used. We clocked almost 6,000 killowatt hours over the course of that month. That’s 174.9 kwh per day. I suppose it’s possible Entergy misread the meter, but let’s assume it’s accurate for now.

How could we possibly have consumed that much energy?

I suspect the problem is lack of insulation. We thought we were in pretty good shape because the house was insulated as part of the renovation. As the seller informed us:

The exterior walls of the house have R13 fiberglass insulation throughout the house. The second floor attic has R30. The lower attic (over the kitchen area) has R19, which was the heaviest insulation that would fit between the joists over that area….

All of the [vinyl] replacement windows (which includes most of the windows in the house) are double-glazed Low E, and Energy Star rated.

However, there’s no insulation underneath the house. Since it’s raised a few feet off the ground, that means plenty of air gets underneath there and when it’s cold you can definitely feel it.

It seems that insulating beneath raised houses in New Orleans presents special challenges. I found an interesting article about this, which outlines the four basic choices: fiberglass, rigid foam board, open-cell spray foam or closed-cell spray foam.

But the more I read the more daunting it looks. I was heartened to learn that a scientific study has been mounted right here in New Orleans, using the different methods to insulate underneath twelve houses in Musicians’ Village for twelve months. But after scouring the web I couldn’t find the final report, so I contacted the principal investigator (Sam Glass at the USDA FPS) and am waiting for a reply.

It’s all further complicated by the fact that our floor could use some repairs in a few places. I assume it would be best to address these repairs before adding insulation.

I don’t think this is something I’m going to tackle myself. There are just too many variables, too many things to screw up, and more work than I have time to accomplish, what with being a public school widower and a daddy.

Oh, the joys of home ownership.

All living things have to be removed from the house prior to fumigation, and relocated elsewhere for approximately 48 hours. (Actually that’s not true; indeed, the whole point of fumigation is to kill off some living things. I did not relocate the termites.) Also, all food has to be remove from the house, except stuff that is canned or otherwise “factory sealed.”

This is similar to evacuation and just as fun. In some ways it’s even more fun.

It’s spooky being inside a house all wrapped up — tarps filtering red light thru windows.

I feel like I’m in a Christo installation.

You’ve been clamoring for a photo of our new house. So, here it is. It was pumped full of poison gas when this was taken.

We spent two nights uptown with my boss. She and her husband were incredibly accommodating and gracious hosts.

After they took off the tarp they put this sign on the house while we waited for the poison gas to disperse:

An unanticipated side benefit to this whole ordeal — our daughter has finally been weaned.

Did I mention we have three cats and a rabbit? They handled the dislocation better than we did.

So we’re back in our home now, but the termites presumably are not.

A few more photos in this set.

Alas, when the flick was over and I turned in for the evening, I neglected to leave a trickle of water running, as I’d done Thursday night. This, despite the fact I knew we were still under a hard freeze warning, with potential record-breaking lows on the way. Sheer stupidity.

See, here in New Orleans many houses have pipes on the outside, exposed to the elements. You can get away with that here for years at a time.

Sure enough, when I woke up this morning, we had no water out the hot taps. The cold taps were working fine.

As I examined our plumbing with greater scrutiny, I concluded that most of our pipes are enclosed. The only place a couple feet of pipe are exposed is our hot water exchange.

Those short little blue pipes leading into and out of our tankless water heater are what froze overnight. By the afternoon they were thawed and appeared to be no worse for the wear.

I tried to pick up some pipe insulation, but the local stores were all sold out. So I improvised, and wrapped the pipes in some foam which I cut from a mattress pad. I secured the foam with garbage-bag twist-ties. I’m actually pretty happy with the result.

As I was driving around Mid-City looking for pipe insulation, I saw the fountain in front of Schoen Funeral Home on Canal Street had frozen quite beautifully.

It was quite striking. I only wish I’d had a better camera with me.

Meanwhile the Banks Street Bar is advertising that, indeed, they “Have Heat.”

Now we are bracing for round three tonight. It will be nice when things warm up next week.

Oh, as for The Big Chill? Not bad. Fun to watch. But I’m not sure I understand why it has such a rep. To watch the retrospective featurette, you’d think they invented the ensemble film. I’m not sure that’s the case. Maybe its success is simply a matter of generational resonance? I’ll have to quiz my boomer friends.

It was pretty painful, but I thought I could tough it out. Xy gave me some ibuprofen. After I got the girl to sleep I started baking gingerbread biscuits for our party the next day. I was cutting them into triangular shapes with a raisin in the center which I thought looked festive and vaguely mystical.

Then, about halfway through the process, the pain in my eye flared up like I couldn’t believe. I don’t know what brought it on. It was just after I had a whiskey sour, and I briefly entertained the fantastic notion that the lemon juice had entered my bloodstream and was now irritating the wound on my eyeball. I was operating with one eye shut and somehow managed to finish the last batches of gingerbread before collapsing for the night.

Lying in bed with both eyes shut, things didn’t seem so bad. But when I got up the next morning I discovered the pain was much, much worse. I was essentially unable to do anything, unable to function. I can’t really think when I’ve felt such pain before. Certainly breaking my toe was no comparison. I was crying like a baby. And here we had a few dozen people coming over in a few hours. Yikes.

Xy drove me to a local hospital and soon I was being admitted to the emergency room. They gave me an eyechart test, which I passed. Then they put a few drops of proxymetacaine (Alcaine) in my eye and within a minute or so I was back to 99% normal. It was like a miracle, a “whole new world” as the doctor put it. This sort of topical anesthetic wasn’t readily available some years ago, so there was little relief for a scratched cornea. As it was I involuntarily laughed out loud, the relief was so sudden and profound.

They squirted some fluorescein (a fluorescent dye) in my eye and looked at it under a black light. Yup, a perfect scratch right across the cornea.

Unfortunately proxymetacaine only lasts about ten or fifteen minutes. Repeated dosing is not advisable because of side effects. So they gave me some ketrolac (Acular) which lasts longer. Alas, I found this to be not quite so effective as the proxymetacaine. Instead of 99% relief it was more like 50%. They gave me some hydrocodone/acetaminophen (Vicodin) to get me over the hump.

Funny thing about the ketrolac. The doctor (who shall remain anonymous) said that according to regulations he was supposed to give me a couple drops and then throw the $50 bottle away and write me a prescription. He thought that was crazy and I had to agree. So instead he slipped me the bottle, an act which I gather could cost him his job. Sometimes rules were meant to be broken.

I was now able to function. My friend James gave me a ride back home. I got to mulling the glögg and icing the gingerbread. We put out blue cheese, almonds and raisins, all of which are traditionally served with glögg in Sweden.

Soon our friends and neighbors were coming by and we had a wonderful party. We received many special gifts, for which we are extremely thankful. I couldn’t begin to list them all here, but I thought Bob R.’s deserved to be cited. He and his wife brought a bag with a loaf of bread, a nice bottle of red wine and some Mediterranean sea salt. I was puzzled until I read the card. Mot only did it have a picture of our house on the front, it contained a quotation from the movie It’s a Wonderful Life which, given the time of year and the circumstance, just seemed so perfect.

George and Mary give the Martinis bread, salt and wine.

Mary to Mrs. Martini: “Bread that this house may never know hunger.”
Mary to Mrs. Martini: “Salt that life may always have flavor.”
George to the Martinis: “And wine, that joy and prosperity may reign forever. Enter the Martini castle.”

Many thanks to everybody.

We even had people coming from out of town for this party — Jenny and Herb and the kids. After the party the boys watched the game while the girls went to Celebration in the Oaks. Leroy eventually decided, way too late, that he wanted to go with the girls. He wasn’t into the game. “Can we watch a different movie now?” Eventually he suffered an extended meltdown which seemed to parallel end of the Saints’ undefeated season. Something of an anticlimactic end to the day but it sure beat the way it started.

As for my eye? As of Monday morning it’s almost back to normal, and I’m off the ketrolac entirely.

The weather has caused our fumigation to be postponed. They were set to tent the house this morning, but during the storms the tarp got ripped. It was on another house at the time. That house has to be resealed and pumped full of more fumigant. So we have to aim for another date.

Meanwhile I’ve got a new worry to preoccupy me. This is by far the heaviest rain we’ve had in a while, and sure enough we sprang a leak. It appears to be in the area where the addition joins the older part of the house. Observant readers will recall a leak in this area was amongst the deficiencies we discovered in our inspection. But that was in at the other end of the addition; at least that repair appears to have held.

We became aware of the drywood infestation when we inspected. The seller had some spot treatments done, but fumigation is the only sure method. I’d have preferred to fumigate when the house was vacant, of course, but there’s only one or two firms in town who do this work, and the waiting list can be lengthy. They couldn’t get to us before the move date.

So we’re displaced again. Oh well, at least it’s only for a couple nights.

There are three kinds of termites we worry about round here: subterraneans, Formosans, and drywoods. Of the three, drywoods eat the slowest and take the longest time to do serious damage. Formosans, on the other hand, can eat an entire house overnight. So if you have to have a termite infestation, drywoods are preferred.

I’ve been assured that all toxins will be dissipated before we move back in. They test to make sure. So you don’t have to worry about inhaling poison gas when you come to our Houseblessing and Glöggfest. (Yes, you’re invited! Follow the link for details and to RSVP.)

In the meantime, despite these challenges, you should still be able to listen to my new radio station. I guess I’ll have to tune in myself if I want to feel at home.

Many thanks (again) to my mother-in-law for her painstakingly accurate labels.

But three weeks after the move, we are down to just eight boxes.

Make that seven boxes. I just unpacked another one.

We’d learned our daughter had lead poisoning and then a few days later I had a close encounter with one of the guys from the corner. Ordinarily I would have laughed off the latter, but the news of our girl’s elevated lead level had softened me up emotionally. It was like a one-two punch.

That evening, as we visited our friends on Grand Route St. John, we stood out on the sidewalk having a drink and talking to neighbors. We noticed a house was for sale on their block, and I couldn’t help thinking how much nicer life would be if we lived there.

In the following days I started thinking about it more seriously and finally called our Realtor on August 5th.

I was leery of writing in much detail about the various steps of the process. Not superstition, just caution. Real estate transactions can be tricky, and I thought for once in my life I’d err on the side of discretion. So I started posting lots of music mixes instead of writing about the nitty-gritty details I was sweating.

I will try to recap the process now, mainly for my own amusement and edification. What follows may not be of interest to anyone else, but who knows?

Let me start by backing up a bit. We bought our house in 2002 for $107,000. Our 2009 Real Estate Assessment from City Hall estimated the fair market value at $170,000, which at the time I thought was a mistake:

I’d love to think we could get $170K for the house. But I’m inclined to think it’s less, probably a few tens of thousands less.

Yet our Realtor guessed we might be able to sell it for as much as $180,000. That gave me pause. After seven years of paying down the mortgage, we only owed $88,000. Thus, I realized that we had enough equity in our house to enable us to “trade up.” It wasn’t the lead paint or the destabilized neighborhood or any single factor motivating us — rather it was the general realization that we could improve our quality of life across the board. A “lifestyle change” is what our Realtor called it, a phrase which still makes me cringe, but which is perhaps accurate.

We developed a short list of features we wanted in a house. As we started looking, we quickly determined the houses we liked started at $250,000. Cheaper houses just didn’t seem like an improvement over what we already owned. But how could we possibly afford a house that costs a quarter million? Several factors at work here: With the sale of our old house we anticipated having enough cash for a substantial down payment. We now earn more than we did seven years ago. Plus, interest rates are even lower now than they were then. But really it all boils down to that first item. Not to be overly pedantic, but that’s the advantage of paying on a mortgage versus paying a landlord. I’d known this theoretically, but I didn’t I fully understand it until we started considering this transaction. I calculated our minimal selling price to be around $154,000 in order for us to afford a $250,000 purchase.

I talked to a banker who verified my numbers. Actually I contacted three bankers. I didn’t “shop the rate,” rather I was looking for the best service. We went with Iberia Bank because they seemed a little more on the ball and a little more personable.

We only looked inside two houses. The first was a couple doors down from Michael (and despite what Adrastos would say we considered that a plus) but the inside of the house left us a bit underwhelmed. It needed a little work; we really wanted a house that was ready to go.

The second house we looked at was down a block and around a corner from the first. It didn’t look quite as appealing from the curb, but as soon as we saw the inside we were sold. It was listed for $259,000. We made an offer of $250,000 on August 24th. Our offer stipulated the seller pay $3,000 of closing costs. The seller made a counter-offer, agreeing to the closing costs but upping the sale price to $253,000. We accepted.

I took a week off work to make some cosmetic repairs to our house to get it ready for market. This included repairing the four-year old damage to the kitchen ceiling.

In the process of scraping the ceiling I opened up a hole in the plaster, but amazingly enough I had on hand everything I needed to patch it up.

I also painted the ceiling in the front room to cover some old water stains. They’d been there when we bought the house. I replaced our defunct garbage disposal; if I’d known it would be so easy I would have done it years ago. And I had a new porch light installed. (Thanks, Josh.)

The next week we did inspections on the house we planned to buy, and found some significant deficiencies. The seller eventually fixed these, but to get it done at the level we wanted we agreed to reduce the seller’s commitment on closing costs to just $1,500.

The week after that we put our house on the market. We had our first open house on Sept. 20th. Nobody came. Not a soul. A week later we had another, with only a couple visitors.

I had been secretly nursing a suspicion that this was all an empty exercise, that we in fact would not be able to sell our house and therefore not able to buy a new one, and that we were merely going through motions for the sake of some weird formality, that we were all players following a script, but when the show was over we’d sleep in the same bed as always.

And then, on the last day of September, we got three offers within a few hours of one another. All were from couples hoping to buy their first home. No slumlords. All were hoping to take advantage of a stimulus from the current administration which expires at the end of November.

Following the wisdom offered by my friend and real estate guru John Byrne, we didn’t go for the most lucrative offer. Instead, we selected the one which seemed to have the most solid financing. In fact that offer was the least lucrative of the three. We dickered back and forth over the exact price, with counter and counter-counter offers, and finally settled on $163,000, with us covering $3,000 of their closing costs.

In early October, they did an inspection on our house. The results were interesting to me because we’d never had a professional inspection done when we bought the place. They didn’t ask for us to fix much, probably because they knew were getting the house at a good bargain. We were to replace a couple missing gutter downspouts, replace some broken windows, and repair a couple dripping drainage pipes under two sinks. I’m glad they didn’t ask us to repair the water damage caused by the drip under the kitchen sink.

Over the next few weeks I got these repaired. I asked for referrals on the neighborhood discussion group and found some good people who knocked it out right quick and for a reasonable price. Louis Blady did the gutters so fast it made my head spin. We had six windows that needed to be replaced. Six! (I recently referred to it the “House of Broken Windows.”) I could have replaced them myself, but it would have taken me twice as long and the work would have been half as good as what Kevin Krause did for us. He and our former neighbor Jesus tried to help with the dripping sinks, but ultimately I had to call in JC Services to resolve that situation.

Meanwhile I was shopping for insurance for our new home. Even though I’d been pretty happy with our insurer in the post-Katrina scenario, I didn’t like the rates they quoted me. We ended up going with Whitney Insurance and saving over a thousand dollars.

And so October slipped away.

Somewhere along the line, somebody dropped the ball. I really don’t know who. It’s entirely possible that it was all my fault, but I’m going to blame it on a bad cell phone connection. All of a sudden I was informed we were supposed to close on October 30th. Oops. I already had plans to be in Houston that day. Our buyer was leaving town after that, so the closing had to be postponed until mid-November.

Then we had to negotiate a pre-occupancy agreement with our seller. We agreed to pay $500 for one week’s rent, and move in a week before the closing.

So we got ready to move. Major props to my mother-in-law who spent a week packing our possessions into boxes.

And then we moved. Major props to our friends and neighbors who knocked that job out in a mere four and a half hours.

The week after we moved was a strange one. We were living in a new house, but we did not own it. We were living out of boxes. We were making frequent trips back to the old house which now stood vacant and forlorn (and seeming more spacious than ever) retrieving those last little things like garden hoses and potted plants, cleaning out the shed, and so on. We were also going back there with loads of laundry, since we did not yet have a washer and dryer at the new house, and our old washer and dryer was included in the terms of the sale. It was also a strange week because Seph was out of daycare more than she was in. Monday was a wash because of Ida; Wednesday was Veteran’s Day; Friday we kept her home because she was sick with what turned out to be an ear infection.

On Wednesday our buyers had their final walkthru of our old house, which I attended. It was my first time to meet them; a young couple, buying their first home, they reminded me of no one so much as Xy and me seven years ago. Younger, even. It was a good feeling.

Finally, on Friday the 13th, I experienced the joy and wonder of a double back-to-back closing. There was some last minute confusion of course. The title company was telling me I needed to bring a certified check, but they wouldn’t know the amount until the documents arrived from the lender. They were supposed to be there a day in advance, but as the hour approached the ambiguity remained. Finally I left my office and headed to the Garden District office where the closing was to transpire, with instructions for the title company to call me when they got the amount so I could pass by the bank and get the certified check. But in the final analysis this wasn’t necessary, and I didn’t need to bring a check at all.

We actually made money on this deal. Here’s the final breakdown. We sold our old house for $163,000 and bought the new one for $253,000. When all the closing costs and whatnot were sorted out we left the table with $6,600.28 in hand. We got an interest rate of 4.875%. With hazard and flood insurance, our monthly payment will clock in at approximately $1,400 — only $200 more than what we were paying on our old house.

At the end of the day I believe everyone was happy. Our buyers were getting their piece of the American dream. Our seller was making good on his investment. Our Realtors were getting their commissions. And we were definitely happy with the way things worked out.

I do have to wonder how Katrina and the floods of ‘05 factor into all of this. If it wasn’t for the flood, we surely wouldn’t have renovated as extensively. We would not have rewired and replumbed the house. The disaster forced our hand. But it also destabilized the neighborhood. I wonder if our house would have sold for more or less if it had never flooded. And would we have been motivated to sell if the neighborhood hadn’t changed so drastically?

In retrospect I now realize this was the biggest financial transaction of my entire life. Yet it didn’t seem nearly as momentous as when we purchased our first house seven years ago. That event is of course documented in ROX #91 and #92. I suppose that was a bigger transition — becoming a property owner for the first time. Now that we are amongst the landed gentry, trading up is more of an incremental move rather than a paradigm shift.

At least it is a beautiful day for a bike ride.

1. The stairs are too steep. The transition between upstairs and downstairs is pretty harrowing. Especially going down I’m sometimes seized by a fear of plunging headlong forward to die of a broken neck. I’m starting to get used to it, though.
2. The floor is spongy. This is an old house that’s been pretty thoroughly renovated. The wood floors have clearly seen better days. The effort to restore them was valiant bordering on heroic. I noticed the waviness during our initial inspections and have learned to cope with that; it’s somewhat akin to walking around slightly tipsy at which I’m fairly well-practiced. But now I’m discovering there are certain spots that give a little when I step on them. I wonder if this can be remedied somehow.
3. There’s not enough storage space. There are plenty of closets, six I think, though I’m not getting up to count them just now. That’s awesome. But our old house had about 500 square feet of storage space in the form of a large “utility room” where we had our laundry facilities. We stuck all manner of crap down there. I kept my tools and our bikes there as well as odd bits of junk picked off the street, fodder for future art projects that somehow never came to fruition. At the new house, not so much. I don’t know where we’ll keep our bikes. I guess we’ll have to build a shed or something.
4. The bathtubs are too small. Seriously. This may sound trivial but it’s not. I’m 6′4″ and subject to mild fits of claustrophobia when I can’t extend my legs fully. When we flew out to Houston a couple weeks ago and the pilot announced that we’d be stuck on the runway for a bit, I had a brief surge of panic and it was mostly related to the thought that I won’t be able to unbend my knees. When we were hunting for our first house in 2002 one of the items on our list was “big claw foot tub,” and it was a selling point on the house we eventually bought, and one of the the things I loved about living there. (Of course we did find that tub was laden with lead.) Our new house has three full baths, amazingly enough, but even more astonishing is the fact that they are all too small for me. These are new tubs, whereas the claw foot I loved so much was very old. I thought people were getting bigger as time went on. (Though obviously this rule of thumb does not apply across the board.) So what gives with the shrinking of the American tub?
5. Location. This is a double-edged sword. In many ways I love this location. It’s near a fun venue that has live music every night, there are some little shops and restaurants — not too fancy but very nice. The street is lined with those archetypal live oaks. And most of all there seems to be a preponderance of owner-occupied homes. Still plenty of rentals around, but we aren’t the sole homeowners on the block like we were before. So that’s all good. And yet… and yet… I have come to think of the intersection of Jeff Davis and Canal as the very center of New Orleans, geographically speaking. It’s halfway between the river and the lake, halfway between the Industrial Canal and the Jefferson Parish line. I kinda wanted to stay near that area, and of course Bayou St. John and the Lafitte Corridor. Now we’re just a little bit removed from all that, on the other side of Carrollton and the other side of Canal. The shortest route from home to work is now through the dreaded Toni Morrison Interchange (named, by the way, for the politician, not the author) rather than the Jeff Davis bike path — augh, that hurts my soul. If you’ve ever tried riding your bike through the Toni Morrison Interchange you’ll understand exactly what I mean. I am now close enough to walk to work in record time via the “highly unpleasant pedestrian path that leads through this concrete knot,” as it’s described in Letters from New Orleans. So our new location is perhaps an improvement, but it’s not an unqualified one.

OK, enough moaning and whining already. I’m glad I got that off my chest.